Last year, the Old Globe Theatre celebrated its 75th birthday. In the year ahead, the Balboa Park institution — San Diego’s flagship theater and the biggest arts organization in the county — faces decisions that could affect its trajectory for decades to come.

First among them is the hiring of new leadership, in the wake of CEO/executive producer Louis G. Spisto’s departure. Spisto announced in October that he would leave his post as the Globe’s top executive at the end of this month ﻿to become an independent producer.

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A few of our theater panelists offer thoughts on the Old Globe's future.

But intertwined with that decision are broader questions about the theater’s artistic vision and its potentially conflicting roles as both a nationally known proving ground for Broadway-bound work and an institution deeply rooted in the local community.

Some of the answers to those questions will flow from what seems likely to be a change in the organization’s flow chart.

While most major regional theaters (including the crosstown La Jolla Playhouse) are run by some combination of an artistic director and an executive or managing director, Spisto did both over the past few years — making the bulk of the Globe’s programming decisions while also handling the administrative and fiscal side.

Though he originally was hired as executive director in 2002, he gradually took on more programming duties as longtime artistic chief Jack O’Brien’s outside directing career caught fire with such Broadway shows as “Hairspray” and “The Coast of Utopia.”

Since the subsequent departures of Jerry Patch in 2008 and Darko Tresnjak in 2009 (the pair shared the theater’s artistic leadership for a short time), the Globe officially has had no artistic director, though it has a few lower-level staffers in the artistic department and hired a literary manager/dramaturg, Danielle Mages Amato, this year.

The institution did well financially during Spisto’s tenure, and he made some adventurous play choices (including next year’s production of the controversial musical “The Scottsboro Boys”). But a company without an independent artistic voice can risk losing sight of its mission, many involved in regional theater say.

“I think it’s just an impossible situation, really,” says Martin Benson, founding artistic director (with David Emmes) of South Coast Repertory Theatre in Costa Mesa, a theater renowned nationally for developing new plays. “You’ve got somebody fighting with themselves continuously about, ‘Artistically I’d like to do this, but financially I don’t know if it’s going to make enough money.’

“To me, they are two distinctly different functions. Without an artistic director, a theater is rudderless. It’s going to follow whatever currents are floating by at the moment.”

Even Spisto says now that the setup was not necessarily ideal.

“The best scenario is when there are two people, and they’re both accountable collectively,” Spisto said in an interview earlier this month. “The artistic director is as responsible to the bottom line and the executive director is as responsible to the artistic development and integrity of the company (as the other is).

“And (now) we have the ability to hire two people simultaneously. The hope is you get two people who work well together. I think they should hire two people. But that has absolutely nothing to do with whether I think we were successful. We were.”

At this point, the Globe has not yet decided (or at least not announced) whether it will go in that direction, much less determined whom it might want to recruit. The theater will be led for the time being by Michael G. Murphy, the interim managing director.

Harold W. Fuson Jr., the Globe’s board chairman, said the first step will probably be to hire a consultant for help in identifying the theater’s needs and searching for potential candidates.

“It’s not unusual for it to take a year from the time you have an opening to the time you get somebody on the ground,” Fuson said. “It could easily take that long. We might enlist some interim help. We’ve told the executive team to let us know what they need.”

But while he chooses his words carefully, Fuson says it’s “not out of the question that the search we’re going to launch is for an artistic director.”

Changing roles

He won’t get much protest from other regional-theater veterans. That includes O’Brien, who said of the prospect of one person doing both jobs: “Oh, it’s impossible.”

O’Brien has minimal involvement with the Globe these days. But speaking from his home in Connecticut, he said that if the theater were to ask for his counsel on how to proceed (which he expects it will), “I’d say I think you’ve got to look at all possibilities, yes. But you certainly have to consider the time-honored form (of dual leadership).”

One irony is that for much of its existence, the Globe essentially was led by one man: founding director Craig Noel, who died last year at age 94. By the time he hired O’Brien in 1981, Noel had spent some four decades turning the theater into a beloved San Diego institution.

But those were the years before the Globe had a $20 million annual budget and, due to O’Brien’s pioneering work in the 1980s, a national reputation for sending such shows as “Into the Woods” and “The Full Monty” to Broadway. (For many years the theater actually was run by three people: O’Brien, Noel and managing director Thomas Hall.)

The growing role of nonprofit regional theaters as creative greenhouses for such commercial, potentially Broadway-bound work has since become a subject of debate, and it’s another matter the Globe may have to grapple with as it plots its future.

Helping shepherd a hit show can (occasionally) prove a windfall for a regional company (La Jolla Playhouse still receives significant income from 2004’s “Jersey Boys”) as well as a source of major prestige and media attention. But some argue it can subvert a nonprofit theater’s artistic mission and its responsibility to the local community.

“I’m very much against that,” says South Coast Rep’s Benson. “There were only three major regional theaters when we started ours (in 1964). The whole idea was we were going to be the theater for Orange County, Calif. If anything happened after that, great. But that wasn’t what we were about.”

Dakin Matthews, a wide-ranging actor-director and Globe associate artist who worked with the company for some 25 years, argues that “theater is supposed to serve the people who are in the theater at that time,” likening it to the way a member of Congress might have a national role but whose first loyalty is to local constituents.

“It’s what Martin and David did so well at South Coast. And South Coast is one of the best theaters in the country because of that.”

(Matthews adds that the Globe would do well to hire a younger artistic director who might shake up the institution and bring fresh energy, at a time when young audiences tend to be a scarce commodity for live theater.)

Fuson agrees there’s merit to the premise that theaters such as the Globe weren’t intended to be “farm teams for Broadway,” although he adds that “we do 15 shows a year, and there aren’t more than a handful that anyone has an intention of taking to Broadway or another commercial (level).” (The last Globe show to hit Broadway was “A Catered Affair” in 2008.)

Kandis Chappell, a distinguished San Diego-born actor who notes that she practically grew up at the Globe (she’s been an associate artist since 1987), says she’d love to see the theater return more to its roots.

“What I’m (hoping) happens is that we get back to being a regional theater, and stop hoping everything we do goes to New York,” she says. “That’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to give great theater to San Diego, which we’ve done for many years.”